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Civil Liberation Theology in Palestine: Indigenous, Secular-Humanist, and Post-Colonial Perspectives

Professor Nur Masalha

The Hebrew Bible and Covenantial Settler-Colonialism in Palestine

In modern times a whole range of Western settler-colonial enterprises have used the mega-narratives of the Bible. The Book of Exodus the second and one the most important books in the Hebrew Bible, has been widely deployed as a framing narrative for European imperialism and its mission civilisatrice , while other biblical texts have been used to provide moral authority for colonial conquests in Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas.

The narratives, rhetoric and prejudices of the Hebrew Bible were responsible for the creation of the myth narrative that the culture of the Philistines—who gave their name to the land of Palestine and indigenous Palestinian Arabs—and Canaanites were culturally inferior to the Hebrew tradition and “Israelite civilization’—an inferiority which justified their subjugation or even elimination. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the European Christian “civilization” began to expand in the “wilderness” of North America, many English puritan preachers in the colonies of the New World, who also actively participated in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, referred to the Native Americans as Canaanites, Amalekites and Philistines who should be either converted, or, if refused, annihilated. Cotton Mather ( 1663–1728 ) a prolific author, New England minister, a slave-owner and one of the most influential religious leaders in the America colonies. His books and pamphlets included The Biblia Americana ( 1693 – 1728 ); Theopolis Americana: An Essay on the Golden Street of the Holy City ( 1710 ); The Christian Philosopher ( 1721 ) Magnalia Christi Americana ( 1702 ); The Negro Christianized ( 1706 ); Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion ( 1692 ); is also remembered for his role in the Salem witch trials. In September 1689 he delivered a sermon in Boston, calling on that members of the armed forces in New England to consider themselves to be the new Israelites in the wilderness, out of which had erupted the civilizing law of God, confronted by new Amalek: pure “Israel” was obliged to “cast out [the “Indian savages”] as dirt in the street” and ethnic cleanse them (Niditch 1993 , 3 ; Prior 2001 , 17 ; also Long 2003 , 180 – 183 ). Similarly, Robert Gibbs, an eighteen century American preacher, thanks the mercies of God the annihilation of the enemies of the new Israelites (that is, the Native Americans) (Bainton 1960 , 112 – 113 ; Prior 2001 , 17 ).

America support for Israel today, like British backing for Zionist colonization of Palestine previously, has effectively combined geo-political strategic interests as well as Christian (Zionist) religion and the Bible. Likewise the Zionist appeal to the land traditions of the Hebrew Bible was critical to the success of the European Zionist settler-colonial movement in Palestine. The term “Zionism” originated in Europe in the late nineteenth century. Political Zionism was, in large measure, the product of the religious and racial intolerance of the Europeans. It originated from the conditions of late nineteenth century Eastern and Central Europe, European romantic nationalist- völkisch ideologies and European settle-colonialism. European Zionist (Jewish) nationalism and settler-colonialism in Palestine imagined itself closely linked with the biblical Hebrew covenant and the State of Israel—established in 1948 in the name of the Hebrew Bible—was built on old biblical symbols and legends and modern Zionist nationalist myths and the Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the notion that God had promised/given the land to the Jews. In God’s Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster , Akenson ( 1992 ) shows how the Hebrew Bible has formed the fundamental pattern of mind of the three settler- colonial societies of apartheid South Africa, Zionist Israel, and Protestant Northern Ireland and how the dominant elites of these three countries have based their cultural identity on a belief in a covenant with an all-powerful conquering God. By going back to the militant parts of the Hebrew Scriptures that defined the “promised land-chosen people” and told the people to conquer it, the religious purpose of the Bible was declared to be the same as the purpose of the secular Israeli state ( 1992 ). But does the Bible justify political Zionism, the military conquest and destruction of historic Palestine by the Israelis in 1948 , and the current Israeli building of the separation/apartheid wall in occupied Palestine? The politics of reading the Bible in Israel and Zionism, a European settler-colonial movement, is a subject which is often dealt with in biblical studies in the West in abstract, with little attention to Zionism’s catastrophic consequences for the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine.

While the Hebrew Bible was not the only “justification,” it certainly was the most powerful one, without which political Zionism was only another conquering European colonial ideology. Read at face value, in a literalist fashion, and without recourse to doctrines of universal human rights and international law, the Hebrew Bible indeed appears to propose that the taking possession of ancient Palestine and the forcible expulsion of the indigenous population (the Canaanites) was the fulfillment of a divine mandate. From a scrutiny of the language used in the Hebrew Bible to the emergence of political Zionism from the late nineteenth-century onwards it is possible to see the way in which a secular European conquering ideology and movement mobilized the figurative language of the Jewish religion into a sacrosanct “title deed” to the land of Palestine signed by God (Prior 1997 ; 1999 ; Wetherell 2005 , 69 – 70 ). Very little is said about the actual genealogy and provenance of Zionism, especially its European settler-colonial context of the late nineteenth-century from which Zionism drew its force; and almost nothing is said about what the creation of the State of Israel entailed for the indigenous inhabitants of the land (Said 1980 , 57 ). Despite its distinct features and its nationalist ideology (exile from and “return” to the land of the Bible) political Zionism followed the general trajectory of colonialist projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America: European colonizing of another people’s land while seeking to remove or subjugate the indigenous inhabitants of the land (Ruether 1998 , 113 ) .

Yahweh’s Mandate to Ethnic Cleanse the Indigenous People: The Grand Narratives of the Bible and Militarism

In recent decades messianic leading rabbis in Israel have frequently referred to the Palestinians as the “Philistines” and “Amalekites of today” and many Zionist-Jewish zealots, including Gush Emunim rabbis and spiritual leaders, have routinely compared Palestinian Muslims and Christians to the Canaanites, Philistines, or Amalekites whose extermination or expulsion by the biblical Israelites was, according to the Bible, predestined by a divine design (Shahak and Mezvinsky 1999 , 73 ).

The Book of Exodus and the conquest narrative of the Hebrew Bible, with its militarist land traditions, are theologically problematic and morally dubious (Prior 1998 , 41 – 81 ). In the narrative of the Book of Exodus, there is an inextricable link between the imaginary liberation of the “biblical Israelites’ from slavery in Egypt and the divine mandate to plunder ancient Palestine and even commit genocide; the invading Israelites are commanded to annihilate the indigenous inhabitants of “the land of Canaan” (as Palestine was then called). In the Book of Deuteronomy (often described as the focal point of the religious history and theology of the Old Testament) there is an explicit requirement to “ethnically cleanse the land” of the indigenous people of Canaan (Deuteronomy 7 : 1 – 11 ; see also 9 : 1 – 5 , 23 , 31 – 32 ; 20 : 11 – 14 , 16 – 18 ; Exodus 23 . 27 – 33 ) (Prior 1997 a, 16 – 33 , 278 – 84 ). The militarist land traditions of the Hebrew Bible, which influenced Zionist settler-colonial in Palestine, appeared to mandate the genocide of the indigènes of Canaan. Of course it is possible to develop a Jewish theology of social justice, liberation and non-violent struggle with strong dependence on the Hebrew prophets—especially with reference to the counter-traditions of the Bible found in the Books of Isaiah, Amos and Ruth. Feminist approaches to religious studies, in particular, have explored counter-discourses in the Bible focusing on the tension between the dominant patriarchal and masculine discourses of the Bible and counter female voices found in the Book of Ruth—Ruth “the doubly Other”—both a Moabite women and a foreigner (Pardes 1992 ). But it would be no more difficult to construct a political theology of ethnic cleansing on the basis of other Hebrew Bible traditions, especially those myth narratives dealing with Israelite origins that demanded the destruction of other peoples. Clearly interpretations of Scripture whether by settler colonial movements or indigenous peoples resisting colonialism has always had theological and ideological dimensions. Inevitably post-modern feminist interpretations of the Bible can be as ideological as traditional patriarchal and masculine interpretations. But all interpretations of ancient holy texts should be subject to a moral critique in line with modern standards of ethical obligations.

Of course an important point to keep in mind is that “Biblical Israel” was a culture and faith not ethnicity and the Israelites and Canaanites were not two distinct ethnicities. At least some Canaanites worshiped Yahweh and as John L. McKenzie, a Roman Catholic biblical scholar, points out: “The influence of the Canaanites upon the biblical Israelites in religion, culture, and other human activities was incalculable” ( 1965 , 118 ); ancient Hebrew, for instance, was a dialect of the Canaanite language. As biblical scholar Robert Caroll argues, so much of the religion and festivals of the Hebrew Bible belongs to Canaanite belief and practice; biblical prejudices and strong antagonism towards the Canaanites and Philistines (McDonagh 2004 , 93 – 111 ) was partly a way of distancing the “new” Hebrew religion from its Canaanite antecedents (Cited in Docker 2008 , 103 ; also Lemche 1995 ). Contrary to the vitriolic anti-Canaanite rhetoric of the Bible authors, the new biblical scholarship has shown that the biblical portrayal of the biblical Israelites’ origins in terms of a conflict between them and the Canaanites or the Philistines is not justification for assuming that such a conflict ever took place in history, in either the twelfth century BC or any other period. Canaanites and biblical Israelites never existed as opposing peoples fighting over Palestine (Thompson 2004 , 23 ; Lemche 1991 ). Biblical scholar Niels Peter Lemche comments on the invention of the ethno-racial divide between the Hebrews and Canaanites by the Bible writers during the post-exilic period:

The “Canaanites” embraced that part of the Palestinian population which did not convert to the Jewish religion of the exiles, the reason being that it had no part in the experience of exile and living in a foreign world which had been the fate of the Judaeans who were carried off to Babylonia in 587 BCE. The Palestinian—or rather old Israelite—population was not considered to be Jews because they were not ready to acknowledge the religious innovations of the exilic community that Yahweh was the only god to be worshipped. Thus the real difference between the Canaanites and the Israelites would be a religious one and not the difference between two distinct nationals. (1991 , 162 , n.12 )

Palestine’s Multi-layered Identity and Pluralistic Settling

In the Bible the Philistines, a people who occupied the southern coast of Canaan at the beginning of the Iron Age (c. 1175 BC)—and who according to the Bible, ruled five city-states (the “Philistine Pentapolis’) Gaza, Askelon, Ashdod, Ekron and Gath (Niesiolowski-Spanò 2011, 38)—were constructed as a typical ideological scapegoat (McDonagh 2004 , 93 –111 ). Biblical prejudice towards and even hatred of them survived in the derogatory meaning of the modern term: “a philistine is a person ignorant of, or smugly hostile to, culture” (Eban 1984 , 45 ; Rose 2004 , 17 ). The name “Palestine” is now associated with the Palestinian Arabs. The Palestinian Arabs are the indigenous people of historic Palestine. Their multilayered Palestinian identity is deeply rooted in the culturally diverse land of Palestine. Palestinian nationalism, however—like all other modern nationalisms—with its construction of national consciousness and identity, is a modern phenomenon (Khalidi R. 1997 ). The Palestinians, until the 1948 catastrophe, were predominantly peasants deeply-rooted in the land of Palestine. Preserved in medieval Arabic toponymy and geography, the term Palestine is derived from the Roman title of the province Palestina, which in turn was based on ancient Philistines. Today it is widely accepted that the Palestinians are a mixture of groups (including descendants of ancient Hebrew and Canaanite tribes) who remained in the land and converted to Christianity and Islam and were later joined by some migrants of Arab descent (Doumani 1995 ; Yiftachel 2006 , 53 ; Ateek 1989 , 16 ). Today the Palestinians are culturally and linguistically Arab and largely but not exclusively Muslim. Many Palestinians are also Christian Arabs who have historic roots in Palestine and a long heritage in the land where Christ lived. Commenting on the multilayered cultural identity and diverse heritage of the Palestinians, Palestinian sociologist Samih Farsoun (1937–2005 ) writes:

Palestinians are descendants of an extensive mixing of local and regional peoples, including the Canaanites, Philistines, Hebrews, Samaritans, Hellenic Greeks, Romans, Nabatean Arabs, tribal nomadic Arabs, some Europeans from the Crusades, some Turks, and other minorities; after the Islamic conquests of the seventh century, however, they became overwhelmingly Arabs. Thus, this mixed-stock of people has developed an Arab-Islamic culture for at least fourteen centuries . . . (Farsoun 2004 , 4 )

Some secular Palestinian nationalists, however, have advocated deep historical roots for Palestinian nationalism—“ethnic roots’ going back over the past three millennia, thus seeing in people such as the Canaanites, Jebusites, Amorites and Philistines and Phoenicians the direct forebears and linear ancestors of the modern Palestinians (Khalidi R. 1997 , 149 and 253 , n. 13 ). Although the cultural heritage of the Palestinians going back over thousands of years, to the ancient, Canaanites, Phoenicians and Philistines, Palestinian nationalism, like all modern nationalism, is a distinctly modern ideology.

A Contrapuntal Reading of the Bible: Edward Said, the Exodus Paradigm and Decolonizing Methodologies

The exiled Palestinian scholar Edward W. Said (1935–2003 ) was the epitome of the secular-humanist scholar-critic, human rights activist and the prophetic public intellectual as moral transformer of society. Said was particularly effective in promoting the idea that “from below” civil liberation in Palestine, based on equality and freedom for all (like the liberation of apartheid South Africa) should serve as a model for Palestinian-Jewish reconciliation, and for fair-minded people everywhere. Said was often described both as “the conscience of Palestine” and as a citizen of the world. He was also described by the New York Times as “one of the most influential literary and cultural critics in the world” (Aruri 2004 , 141 ). His passionate engagement as a fearless intellectual in worldly, real-life issues was a constant inspiration for many Palestinians under Israeli occupation and in exile. No one could easily fill his place on the many platforms on which he so powerfully represented the cause of Palestine and Palestinian struggle for liberation. Said’s secular-humanist discourse engaged with some of the great themes of theologies of liberation: tearing down the walls between theory and practice, the act of witnessing to suffering and oppression, speaking truth to power, critique of power and inequalities and human dignity and social justice.

The focus of Said’s worldly humanism and civil liberation was solidarity with the poor and oppressed. He bridged the gap between the underprivileged and the ivory tower. He took up the cause of marginalized Palestine in venues that were likely to be closed to the underprivileged—the lecture theatres, the concert stage, the high-brow journals, the principal television shows, the numerous occasions honoring him and celebrating his work worldwide (Aruri 2004 , 141 ). Said, of course, articulated the aspirations of many indigenous and oppressed peoples, and of the disenfranchised and marginalized. But the plight of the Palestinian people, the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe), the dispossession and dislocation of the Palestinians, the exile and refugeedom, overwhelming sense of loss and cultural resistance became a main feature of his political writings. However, although this deep sense of injustice, physical and legal dislocation, and exile is unremitting in Said’s writings, it is from that sense of injustice, outrage and dislocation that the empowerment and resistance of the Palestinians emerges. Over the past three decades Said, the public intellectual, played a key role in trying both to empower and to transform the international discourse on Palestine. Issues such as the dispossession of the Palestinians, memory and identity in exile, Palestinian oral history, the “right of return” of the Palestine refugees, Zionist responsibility for the ongoing Palestinian catastrophe, the authoritarianism and corruption of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and, most recently, the one-state secular-democratic, have constituted much of Said’s concerns.

Prior to 1948 Palestine was overwhelmingly inhabited by Palestinian Arabs, who owned much of the land. The creation of the Israeli state entailed expulsion of the Palestinians and the turning of most Palestinians into refugees. Today there are over six million Palestinian refugees in the Middle East and nearly 70 percent of all Palestinians are refugees or internally displaced persons. In 1967 Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza, the last two fragments of historic Palestine. One of Said’s favorite themes, which he explores in Orientalism and The Question of Palestine is the relationship between power and knowledge. In terms of Palestine, the Zionist idea of a “Jewish homeland,” which saw, eventually, the destruction of Palestine and establishment of Israel in 1948 , was prepared for in advance by the knowledge accumulated by British biblical scholars and theologians, biblical archaeologists, colonial administrators, and experts who had been surveying the area and exploring the “Bible lands” since the mid-nineteenth century. It was this knowledge that enabled the Zionists to maintain arguments similar to those of the British imperial project. While historically the Palestine question favored the victor (Israel) and marginalized the victim, Said injected into the historiographical debate his original thoughts about issues such as representation, power relations and the production of knowledge—all very relevant issues to the writing of history and liberating methodologies.

The historical importance of biblical mega stories like Exodus for settler-colonial histories of Europeans, Americans and Israeli-Zionists was the subject of an extraordinary debate between Edward Said and Michael Walzer, an American Jewish author (Said 1986 a, 289–303 ; 1988 , 161 – 178 ; Walzer 1986 , 289 – 303 ). The publication of Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution in 1985 ignited a controversy which centered on how a religious narrative should be represented. Walzer presented an argument for the Exodus narrative as a paradigm for radical, progressive and even revolutionary politics ( 1985 ). Walzer developed Moses as a leader of a progressive national liberation movement on its way to the Promised Land and by implication on a mission to establish the ethical relationship of man to God. In a compelling critique of Walzer’s book, entitled: “Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution : a Canaanite Reading,” Said took upon himself the task of reading the biblical narrative with the eyes of the Canaanites (Said 1986 a, 289 – 303 ). Said was impressed by Walzer’s skills as a writer but not by his intellectual integrity or skills as a historian and even less as an honest interpreter of the Israel-Palestine conflict. For Said, Walzer’s Exodus politics—a contemporary reading of the Hebrew Bible story—was a sophisticated obfuscation of reality, a thinly-veiled apology for the settler-colonial policies of the Israeli state and a historical repetition of the narrative of the conquest of the land of Canaan (Hart 2000 , 1 – 6 ; Said 1986 a, 289 – 303 ).

Like Said, the above North American native author Robert Allen Warrior, found the Exodus paradigm, with its key concept of “Yahweh the conqueror,” oppressive rather than empowering and liberating. Warrior argues that the obvious characters for the native American people and other indigenous people to identify with in this story are the Canaanites—the indigenous people who already lived in the Promised Land ( 1995 , 289 )—hence the biblical injunction to exterminate the indigenous inhabitants of Canaan by the Israelites while performing their mission inspired by God. Warrior observes: “It is the Canaanite side of the story that has been overlooked by those seeking to articulate theologies of liberation’; “Especially ignored are those parts of the story that describe Yahweh’s command to mercilessly annihilate the indigenous population (Warrior 1995 , 279 ). Both Warrior and Said are aware of the fact that the biblical stories are not necessarily rooted in reality; chapter seven has shown the impossibility of the Exodus, the Sinai Revelation and the conquest of the land of Canaan; both Warrior and Said make a clear distinction between the Exodus paradigm and the actual historical events in ancient Palestine. Like Warrior, Said argues that the Exodus paradigm demonstrates that there was no Israel without the conquest of Canaan and the expulsion or inferior status of Canaanites–then as now. Said, in his resistance “Canaanite reading” of the Bible, observes:

Walzer uses the rhetoric of contemporary liberation movement to highlights certain aspects of the Old Testament history and to mute or minimize others. The most troubling of these is of course the injunction laid on the Jews by God to exterminate their opponents, an injunction that somewhat takes away the aura of progressive national liberation which Walzer is bent upon giving the Exodus (1988 , 165 –66 ).

Engagement with the Worldly and Self-Liberation

The argument made here is that reality and experience do produce theologies, histories, cultures and memories. Theologies are the product of realities, not the other way around. Theologians believe they can influence reality, and sometimes they do, but theologies and theologians, whether in Palestine and in Latin America, are a product of reality. Moreover liberation cannot be imposed “from above’: it has to come “from within” and “from below,” along with indigenous traditions that are democratic and popular.

Palestinian Liberation “from within,” “from without” and “from below” were central Edward Said’s “battle for worldly humanism” and prophetic activism. Said’s account of humanism evolved over time but his battle for worldly humanism and his insistence on secular-humanist, non-religious and none-supernatural, ways of thinking, colored much of his writings (Apter 2004 , 35 – 53 ; Davis 2007 , 125 – 135 ). Said’s own personal experience and intellectual evolution are central to his concept of worldly humanism. For Said, worldly humanism was a continuous process of unending discovery, self-clarification and self-criticism and auto-emancipation (Davis 2007 , 125 – 135 ). Driven from his homeland into exile and living much of his life in the United States, Said, more than any other public intellectual/activist, sought to overcome history and exile by creating a cosmopolitan intellectual space and by giving a theoretical and practical underpinnings to the influence of one’s own experience and worldliness on understanding texts and overcoming history.

From the 1970 s onwards Said began to highlight the peculiar claims of the “ redemptive” settler-colonial Zionist project in Palestine, with its political uses of the biblical text and notions of “land redemption-redemptive occupation” and settler-colonialism as the fulfillment of biblically ordained, divine promises. The Zionist “redemptive/restorative” project, Said observed, dehumanizes the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine and vouchsafes the supremacist “chosen people” with the extremely problematic gift of redemption, elevating them into the status of divine agents, while reducing the unredeemed, displaced indigenous inhabitants of the land, the Palestinians, and putting them outside any humanist, moral and ethical concerns (Said 1986 a, 289 – 303 ).

But Said was also criticized by biblical scholar Keith Whitelam, in his seminal work, The Invention of Ancient Israel ( 1996 ), for not devoting sufficient attention to the field of biblical studies. In 1999 Said even wrote:

[Keith] Whitelam is quite right to criticize my own work on the modern struggle for Palestine for not paying any attention to the discourse of biblical studies. This discourse he says was really part of Orientalism, by which Europeans imagined and represented the timeless Orient as they wished to see it, not as it was, or as its natives believed. Thus biblical studies, which created an Israel that was set apart from its environment, and supposedly brought civilization and progress to the region, was reinforced by Zionist ideology and by Europe’s interest in the roots of its own past. Yet, he concludes, “this discourse has excluded the vast majority of the population of the region.” It is a discourse of power “which has dispossessed Palestinians of a land and a past. Whitlam’s subject is ancient history and how a purposeful political movement could invent a serviceable past which became a crucial aspect of Israel’s modern collective memory. When the mayor of Jerusalem a few years ago proclaimed that the city represented 3 ,000 years of unbroken Jewish dominance, he was mobilizing an invented story for the political purposes of a modern state still trying to dispossess native Palestinians who are now seen only as barely tolerated aliens (Said 1999 a, 15 ).

However for Said, Zionism and its modern mobilizing myths have to be studied not in abstract, but in practice and mainly from the standpoint of its victims. The impact of Said’s historical perspective—which we find not only in The Question of Palestine and Orientalism but in many of his articles—on rewriting the history of Zionism from the perspective of its victims cannot be overestimated. Said’s historical perspective on the 1948 Palestinian Nakba—combined with the new historiographical picture that emerged from the archival material of recent years and Palestinian oral history—introduced us to the catastrophe inflicted upon the Palestinians in the 1948 war. Furthermore Said was never uncritical when it came to the Palestinian leadership and its share in the Palestinian disaster. It was the failure of the Palestinian leadership to respond to the effectiveness of Zionist designs which became one of the main causes of the Palestinian refugee exodus of 1948 .

Said’s publications have also inspired my own work on Palestine. In 1992 I published a book called Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1992 , which is largely based on Hebrew archival material. This was followed by two books, A Land Without a People ( 1997 ) and The Politics of Denial : Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Problem ( 2003 ). More recently, I published two volumes, The Bible and Zionism: Invented Traditions, Archaeology and Post-Colonialism in Palestine-Israel ( 2007 ) and ( 2012 ) The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory ( 2012 ). In the last two decades we have had major contributions by other Palestinian authors, some of whose critical accounts have been based on the oral history of the Palestinian refugees themselves. But I think it was Said who was the first to locate the Nakba in a wider perspective. His critical strength was in juxtaposing the Palestinian catastrophe, and all its horrors, with its denial , not only in Israel, but also in the West. In many of his works Said exposed the Western media’s attempts to sideline, if not altogether eliminate from the public domain, the tragedy of Palestine. While most people opposed the exclusion and injustices of the apartheid regime in South Africa, Said pointed out, there has been a deep reluctance among both liberal and radicals in the West to condemn Zionist “ethnic cleansing” and the exclusion of the Palestinians under Israeli apartheid policies.

In The Question of Palestine Said also documents the manner in which Zionism began as a European conquering ideology and a settler colonial movement seeking to colonize Palestine, not unlike that of European colonial expansion in the nineteenth century: “Zionism has appeared to be an uncompromisingly exclusionary, discriminatory, colonialist praxis’ (Said 1980 , 69 ). But the colonization of Palestine also differed from other European settler colonial projects. Said thought that a peculiar feature of Zionist colonization was the notion of a “redemptive” occupation and the fulfillment of God’s promise. For Said, Zionism (in its both secular and religious versions) has reduced the inhabitants of Palestine to an aberration that had challenged the supremacist and xenophobic notions of God-given biblical status of the “Promised Land” (Said 1980 , 56 – 114 ). Said, the secular humanist, had this to say:

That Messianic, redemptive quality . . . [is] so foreign to me, so outside me, so unlike anything I have experienced (Ashcroft 1996 , 13 ).

Reading Said’s thoughts about these topics, one can immediately connect his critique with the role of progressive narrative and decolonizing historiography in the Palestine conflict. It was Said who undermined the hegemonic Zionist narrative in both the public and academic spheres. This hegemonic Zionist narrative, which has dominated the academic discourse in the West, reads as follows: At the end of the nineteenth-century “a people without land arrived in a country without people,” modernized it, and “made its deserts bloom,” while it had to fight for its life against inexplicable barbaric attacks by its Islamic and Arab neighbors. For Said, to write differently and more truthfully about what happened was not merely a more professional historiography, but was also a question of truth-speaking and a political act of liberation. These questions became central to Said secular-humanist decolonizing methodologies. Said was also effective in promoting the idea that the idea of civil liberation in Palestine (like the liberation of apartheid South Africa) should serve as a model for Palestinians and fair-minded people throughout the world.

Said’s Battle against the Oslo Process and the Internalization of the Israeli Occupation: The Secular-Humanist Democratic Vision for Palestine-Israel

In the 1990 s the Oslo process led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority which in turn sought to internalize rather than resist the occupation. This process led to the fragmentation of the Palestinian territories into areas A, B and C and the consolidation of Israeli settlements. The search for an alternative to the process of internalizing the Occupation, an alternative anchored in universal human rights and international law, which would also uphold the Palestinian “right of return” and self-determination, led Said to the one-state solution: a secular-democratic state based on post-Apartheid South Africa and on equality for every single human being in Palestine-Israel and justice. One non-sectarian democratic state based on non-discrimination with equal rights for Palestinians, Israelis, Jews, Muslims, Christians and atheists is closer to values of liberal democracies than a mono-religious, ethnocratic state (Yiftachel 2006 ) created specifically for one religious group (namely the Jewish one) at the expense of the indigenous people of Palestine, whose laws uphold the superior rights of one religion- ethnicity-race, over that of another, including the Palestinian citizens of Israel, who constitute one-fifth of the total population of Israel. The one state solution became the motto of Said’s struggle in his final years: a joint Palestinian-Israeli struggle. Said’s rethinking of the Palestine question was an indictment of the narrow brand of ethnic (both Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arab) nationalism that seemed either unwilling or incapable of re-examining the foundational myths and mistakes of the past.

For Said, the ongoing Zionist settler-colonialism, Israel’s ethnocractic regime and “Apartheid/Separation Wall” at the heart of Palestine have all brought about the death of the two-state solution. This also meant that the architects of the Oslo accord had inadvertently set the stage for a single non-sectarian state in historic Palestine. Such a vision was based on Said’s notion of multiple identities, which reflected his universalist, non-ethnic, non-sectarian perspective. Such an optimistic vision does not conceive secularism or the secular democratic state and faith as contradictive. In a secular democratic state, the common denominators are still equal rights, equal citizenship, religious freedom, religious plurality, and co-existence between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. Said was not politically naïve; such a vision can only derive from a long-term, joint Arab-Jewish struggle for equality, expressed within a single, secular democratic framework (Aruri 2004 , 142 ). For Said, secular and liberal bi-nationalism was not only desirable but also the only realistic way for Palestine-Israel. In his last decade Said was the principal voice for a pluralist co-existence in historic Palestine. His rethinking of the Palestine question in secular humanist and universalist terms—extending far beyond the Palestine issue, to touch wide and diverse audiences—is the key to understanding his extraordinary and enduring legacy.

Said passionately believed that only by a fundamental critique of the Zionist project in “historic Palestine” and only when the Palestinians themselves managed to rediscover, rethink, reform and reconstruct their democratic secular polity, and transform it from an empty slogan into a viable programme for the present realities in Palestine-Israel, only then could the hope for real peace be rekindled. It was this commitment that drove him and allowed him to envision a different future for Palestine-Israel, where mutual recognition will be in place and would not mean the subjugation of the Palestinian people.

Decolonizing Civil Liberation Theology “from Below”: Naji Al-Ali’s Handhala as a Witness/Martyr and Drawing Defiance and Resistance

Edward Said, Naji Al-Ali (1936–1987 ) and Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008 ) were probably the three most influential Palestinian commentators and social activists. The three we victims of/witnesses to the 1948 Nakba and the three achieved a prophetic status. Like Said and Darwish, Al-Ali was driven exile in 1948 , when the Zionists combined Western support and the Bible to legitimize the ethnic cleansing of the Promised Land of its indigenous inhabitants. Al-Ali was born in the Palestinian village Al-Shajarah, located between Nazareth and Lake Tiberias. His village (like Darwish’s al-Birwa village) was occupied and destroyed by the Israeli army in 1948 . The barefooted and uprooted Al-Ali grew up in the Lebanese refugee camp Ein Hilwa and his first drawings were on prison walls in Lebanon. Al-Ali ended up working in the Arab Gulf and educating himself, as his way forward, and he developed his distinct activist satirical art of resisting exile.

Another influential Palestinian refugee in Lebanon, the novelist Ghassan Kanafani ( 1936–1972 ) who owned Al-Hurriya magazine, and who was assassinated by the Israeli army in Beirut in 1972 , began publishing Al-Ali’s political cartoons in his magazine. Subsequently Al-Ali worked for different Arab newspapers, eventually became a well-known cartoonist, famous for creating the figurative character Handhala, which every Palestinian person knew. Imprisoned in Lebanon and frequently censored in the Arab press, Al-Ali created—from 1969 until his assassination outside the London offices of a Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Qabas by unction assailants in 1987 (Farsoun 2004 , 111 )—the now-famous Handhala cartoons. These depict the complexities and plight of Palestinian life in exile and the anguish of dispossession and statelessness. These cartoons are still relevant today and the power of the character of Handhala, the refugee child, who is present in every single cartoon, remains a potent symbol of the defiance, hope and struggle of the Palestinian people for justice, return and self-determination.

The character of Handhala was based on an indomitable eleven-year-old barefoot child whose character was inspired by real stories of barefoot Palestinian children in Lebanon’s refugee camps. Al-Ali explains why he created Handhala:

“I am Hanzala [sic] from the Ain Al-Hilwa [sic] camp [in Lebanon]. I give my word of honor that I’ll remain loyal to the cause . . .” That was the promise I had made myself. The young, barefoot Hanzala was a symbol of my childhood. He was the age when I had left Palestine and, in a sense, I am till that age today. Even though all this happened 35 years ago, the details of that phase in my life are still fully present in my mind . . . The character of Hanzala was a sort of icon that protected my soul from falling whenever I felt sluggish or I was ignoring my duty. That child was like a splash of fresh water on my forehead, bringing me to attention and keeping me from error and loss. He was the arrow and the compass, pointing steadily towards Palestine. Not just Palestine in geographical terms, but Palestine in its humanitarian sense—the symbol of a just cause, whether it is located in Egypt, Vietnam or South Africa. (cited in Kopf-Newman 2011 , 124 –125 )

Handhala is not a detached witness: his face is either obscured or deliberately turned away from viewers and his hands are clasped behind his back as a sign of rejection of hypocrisy and defiance. The character of Handhala became a powerful icon of Palestine and the symbol of Palestinian refugee struggle for justice, return and liberation. Handhala also became phenomenally popular in the Arab world, spawning a popular industry of coffee mugs and T-shirts. Appearing in more 40 , 000 cartoons, Handhala became the timeless conscience of Palestine. (El-Fassed, 2004 )

Handhala is very important to the evolution of an engaged civil liberation theology in Palestine. In the making of this liberation theology from within, rooted in a multi-layered identity and pluralistic context of the region, Handhala occupied a unique space in Palestinian psyche, popular consciousness and collective memory. Handhala defined the liberating resistance and symbolized the sacrifices and martyrdom of ordinary people. He is a witness, in Arabic shahid , to decades of Palestinian dispossession, bitterness, anger, defiance and resistance. The Arabic word Shahid derives from the same trilateral root, Shahadah which in Arabic means both martyrdom as well as the act of witnessing. Handhala is a powerful symbol of Palestinian defiance and a witness to the validity and justness of the cause for which the sanctity of a human being has been continuously violated and Palestinian life is being lost on a day basis. In the course of the Palestinian national liberation struggle for over sixty decades countless brave men, women and children have lost their lives in that path and thus becoming martyrs for the liberation of their homeland and a testimony to the nobility of that cause. Handhala is also a witness to ongoing Israeli Occupation, atrocities and dehumanization coupled with Arab impotence, corruption and betrayal. The represents these martyrs/witnesses: witness of the suffering; of the refugees; of the refusal to give up and be defeated. Handhala is a Palestinian humanist civil theology at its best, both critical and universal. It unites Palestinians of all walks of life and is a symbol of ordinary people and human dignity. His indomitable spirit of Handhala we can also find the potent symbol of the Palestinian “right of return,” a sacred right, something no Palestinian can give up.

As “bearing witness” for the just cause for which countless Palestinian martyrs have lost their lives, the ordinary Handhala commands a transformative position and power. The metamorphic figure of Handhala as witness/martyr implicates the formation of a civil liberation theology in Palestine “from below”—theology which goes far beyond any denominational Christian or Muslim theology. This civil theology of liberation “from below” is crucial to the future of Palestine-Israel and any humanistic, democratic, pluralistic context. It allows us to transcend the denominational and religious variations into something universal and more important. This new civil theology of liberation is born out of people’s collective memory and popular struggle over an extended course of history and therefore can give us something wider and beyond the current religious dimensions. The ordinary figurative character of Handhala as a martyr/witness is the quintessence of resistance by a people determined to overcome exile and transcend history and look for a better future.

For the leading three Palestinian witnesses/activists: Naji Al-Ali, Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish, the struggle for decolonization and libertarian in Palestine is rooted in the multilayered identity and multifaceted setting of Palestine. This struggle occurs across multiple sites. For the three witnesses/commentators, the determination of the Palestinians to overcome history and envisage a better future is part of a universalized vision of humanity. Palestine is not just a geo-political entity, it is the symbol of, and part of the struggle for, a just cause, whether this cause is located in Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe or the Americas.

The civil theology of Al-Ali, Said and Darwish, was not monolithic. While Said insisted on a secular-humanist discourse, the humanist poetry of Mahmoud Darwish avoided the oppositional binary between the secular and religious. Darwish’s poetry was inspired not only by the Palestinian condition: of dispossession and dislocation of exile but also hugely influenced by some of the great themes and figurative language of the Quran and the Bible. For Darwish, the loss of the homeland was synonymous with the loss of Eden to be redeemed by the struggle for rebirth and cultural renaissance.

Crucially, however, the civil liberation theology of Palestine went beyond the cultural scope and sites in which Palestinian Sabeel liberation theology sought to articulate as well as beyond what Dr. Na’im Ateek articulated in his 1989 book, Justice and Only Justice . Both Sabeel’s grassroots theology and the Kairos Palestine Document of 2009 embodied a liberation movement among Palestinian Christians. Sabeel has sought to make the Gospel of Jesus contextually relevant to Palestine-Israel and has striven to develop a Palestinian theology based on justice, peace, nonviolence, liberation and reconciliation for the different ethnic and faith communities. Sabeel has also been highly critical of Christian Zionism which has been “successful in providing not only theological justification for Palestinian displacement, forced exile and continued oppression, but also is directly responsible for marshalling material resources” in support of Zionist settler-colonialism. However the none-denominational civil liberation theology of Al-Ali, Said and Darwish has sought to bring together people from multiple traditions and multiple sites and not just Palestinian Muslims and Christians—multiple sites which articulated the multiple moral voices of Palestine and anger, pain, dignity and hope within a universalized human context.

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